Achronix 6 billion-transistor FPGAs: Take two

PARIS – Achronix’s new 6 billion-transistor device, the first FPGA to be built on a 22-nm manufacturing process at Intel Corp. and promised to start sampling this quarter, won’t arrive in the market until the first quarter of 2013.

The HD 1000, the first in the Achronix family of FPGAs designated Speedster 22i HD, was supposed to reach the market before the end of this year.

Achronix Chairman John Lofton Holt (left) said the delay stemmed from “our design issues." He called the delay “disappointing.”

The Speedster22i HD family are SRAM-based, fully-reconfigurable FPGAs offering a familiar fabric architecture consisting of synchronous look-up tables, flops, muxes, carry chains, memories and multipliers, according to Achronix. Integrated with a variety of high-speed data communications interfaces, the Speedster22i FPGAs are designed to work in networking and telecommunications equipment.

Despite the delay, Holt said he remains confident about the HD 1000’s rollout early next year, insisting that the flagship FPGAs remain the company’s core business.

The delay, coming as Achronix is rolling out its strategy to enter the embedded FPGA IP business (disclosed several weeks prior to the product delay disclosure), could raise questions about where the eight-year-old FPGA company is headed. A fabless chip company entering the IP business is generally a long shot since the strategy requires an entirely new business model for a much tougher market.

IP licensing is an inherently long-term business. Before IP licensors can even think about royalties, licensees must first successfully design SoCs by using the licensed IP, then their chips must take off quickly when they hit the market.

Asked about it, the Achronix chairman laughed. “Yes, I know. The IP business tends to get people worried.”

Holt added that Achronix is not altering its business model. “Our core business still remains in high-performance, high-density FPGAs."

IMO what FPGA vendors need (and what they've always needed) is to open up their architectures and bit stream formats so that FLOSS software developers can take a crack at it. There are myriad applications for FPGAs that aren't progressing well because it's too cumbersome to use the vendors' tools. These include reconfigurable computing and specialized high-performance parallel architecture. It's just too hard to make progress in these areas with vendor tools so the people working in those areas simply do it in other ways, causing FPGA vendors to miss out on a lot of opportunity and miss out on the savings of letting others write their tools.
JMO/YMMV

These small FPGA companies need some good 3rd-party tools. They can hand off the synthesis to Synplify, but somebody needs to make some 3rd-party place & route tool that can service all these little FPGA companies. Surely 80% of the work is common to different architectures.

We hear even with Intel matching TSMC with die-pricing (a loss leader for Intel), Achronix 22nm part is not competitive (power and leakage) with other FPGA.
why part not sampling
why Achronix needs to change business model

The devices announced by Archronix are designed for backend fabric, they are loaded with serdes. It seems odd that Holt is talking about mobile applications: power management is very weak in FPGAs, maybe they have a different kind of configurability in mind, to knit together some Intel IP.
I have not seen anything about design software yet from this company, which is normally a big concern for FPGAs. It makes me think Intel may have more of a hand in the overall enterprise here than is evident at this point.

The last succesful FPGA start-up company was Actel, who shipped their first product in 1988. You could say "it's been a while since then". Indeed, but not for lack of trying. More than 25 start-ups have tried and failed. Most failed by the nature of their FPGAs, and a few failed by the market barriers erected by the four FPGA vendors. You cannot make a business out of FPGAs by making a new FPGA that is slightly faster or slightly cheaper than what is out there. To succeed you must double the FPGA performance or cut the price-per-LUT by half. Acronix long ago claimed to have done the first of these, but they could not deliver on that promise, even with Intel's fanciest process. So they change the business model to survive for a little while longer. Everybody comments on how tough the IP business is, but the FPGA business is much tougher. Their new tack is an acknowledgement of this fact.